


snow families

by samarqand



Category: Marvel 616, X-Factor (Comics)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-13
Updated: 2013-02-13
Packaged: 2017-11-29 04:07:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/682597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samarqand/pseuds/samarqand
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the developments in X-Factor #218 have been settled,  Shatterstar entertains existential questions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	snow families

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for around X-Factor #218 and any consequent developments thereafter that feat. one Guido Carosella's status.

After it’s settled, after the coffee pot has been set to boil Julio out of his dark sleepiness eight or more times, Shatterstar has questions.  
“Even if he doesn’t have a soul,” he ruminates to Longshot, out of reach of snap judgment and questions, “it wasn’t that he lost his talents or his objectives.” He pauses. “Whatever those have been lately, come to think of it.”

“Maybe nobody could vouch for his objectives, either,” Longshot decides. ”Maybe there were some creative differences.”

“We don’t do much creating,” Shatterstar says. “I don’t, anyway.”

“That’s why you don’t understand this fiasco.”

“This is a fiasco?”

Longshot looks intrigued. ”Maybe,” he wonders.

+

“Why did we shun Guido?”

Julio slides his finger across the ‘k’ key, his eyes on the screen.

“Ask Layla,” he says baldly.

Shatterstar touches Julio’s hair. Some of those locks spring insatiably to the right or left. Some curl behind his ears. It’s a detail done just right. Tea with Rahne’s suggestion for cream in lieu of milk. That sort of small satisfaction.

Julio keeps still. Shatterstar can watch him sift through nouns and patch together diplomatic structures in the way he coughs into his sleeve, and then keeps his head hung low over the keyboard. ”He lost more than we can imagine he lost,” he explains gingerly, “when he lost his soul.”

“I don’t have a soul,” Shatterstar reasons.

“You don’t know that,” Julio snaps. Then, ”No. It’s different.”

“Different how?”

“I don’t know.”

“This is what I know about Guido Carosella: he was a deceptively simple warrior. A devastating sparring partner. He made many cryptic remarks to me throughout our dalliance, but I do believe his preoccupation with private jokes about gladiators spoke to his fighter’s — “

“Is this a memorial service behind me?” Julio spins around in his office chair.

“I just don’t want to forget.”

“Don’t be so sentimental,” Julio grouses. ”There’s nothing to miss ‘cause there’s nothing good down that road, Star.” He seems taken with Shatterstar’s pristine white lapel, lost in the vast absence of color. He doesn’t seek Shatterstar’s eyes again when he says, “There’s nothing we missed. There was no SOS.”

“Save our,” Shatterstar begins, and then falls into the silence ruled by the hum of the computer, thinking of something Guido had, S-alliterative, worth saving. Stocking, if it were Christmas. Sleep, if Guido woke up realizing his abandonment.

+

“It means Guido is more susceptible,” Shatterstar hypothesizes.

Longshot smiles a blazing bright smile. ”I don’t follow.”

“It means Guido is more susceptible to suggestion,” Shatterstar decides, waiting for explicability to follow.

It doesn’t.

+

Animals dream of other animals.

Shatterstar thinks he dreams, in his own way. He closes his eyes and soon enough, crawls into himself and finds something deeply hidden, tucked away with the care Julio gives his body on cold nights, when Julio finds him on the sofa and drags the covers out from the bedroom to throw on him unceremoniously, hurried to see him safe.

He falls deep into sleep tonight, swimming down unbearable leagues. He puzzles slowly over the abrupt disowning of one teammate, how they all talked of Guido like he’d died unexpectedly, but grief would soon give in to recovery. Their soulless friend.

And yet, people like them will still mourn extinct animals; the TV hosts three-hour anniversaries on arbitrary dates for crowned and speckled birds, large glowering predators, and hypothetical species of dinosaur. They line primetime like death’s pageant, one after another, straight on till infomercials. Everything funereal, even amid their tales of triumph.

The audience can miss the animals because these creatures had their souls when they died.

Shatterstar opens his eyes. Something immense fills his chest at the thought of life before his, and how proud he is of these great and small and brief wondrous beings, for having kept their souls safely settled to slumber through such a long, arduous life.

How swiftly, how savagely such things can be stolen.

How lonely they could’ve been.

Shatterstar recognizes the duvet and extra sheets smothering him and wrestles himself off the sofa.

He finds his way to Julio’s room.

He perceives Julio in darkness, awake despite this hour and unfamiliar for being so. He looks small with his shadow splayed across the wall, alive with the light of the city streetlights.

“I think maybe I could’ve understood him,” Shatterstar realizes aloud. ”Do you think I should’ve said something?”

“You are guilty of nothing.”

“I know.”

“Why do you feel guilty?”

“I don’t know which is the guilty feeling.”

Julio opens his hand to show his palm, to show he has nothing left to offer. He looks hallowed where he stands, outside the bathroom, dark with his far-flung shadow that almost reaches Shatterstar.

Shatterstar follows it.

“I don’t know who I was when I was young.”

“You fought,” Julio tells him, “and,” he pauses, “and you fought.”

“I was just an improper noun.”

“Give it a rest.”

“I don’t mind it.”

“I do.”

“I remember thinking you had beautiful skin, back when I fought and I fought.”

Julio kisses him with a hunger he hadn’t known had been growing. He feels the odd ineffable feeling that ‘beauty’ had no application before Julio.

Then Julio pushes him down onto his bed. Shatterstar falls and waits with urgency until Julio follows, straddling his waist and leaning in to cover him like Shatterstar wishes he’d thought to.

He grasps at Julio’s wrists instead, keeping him prisoner so close against him.

“Tell me more.”

They’re Shatterstar’s words, not Julio. He thinks, immediately, that he wants to switch, that he wants to tell Julio more, or everything, rather; all those missed chances, multitudinous and horrifying in their enormity throughout the years. Wants to tell him now everything he ever thought, just speak and absolve himself of the wrongdoings, just letting Julio stand there in the doorways or lie in bed all those nights never knowing —

But Julio’s eyelashes tickle against his cheek and he keeps close, whispering.

“Remember,” he murmurs with a smile in his voice that short-circuits rationality, “when you started noticing commercials for candy, and you were so disappointed when you bit into a gusher and it wasn’t — like, flavored 3D magma like the commercial showed?”

“Dark day,” Shatterstar answers.

“Or when you wanted to send an award to Ms. Betty Crocker, for her devotion to fruit-by-the-foot’s integrity.”

“Three feet,” Shatterstar reflects at the ceiling. ”That’s no joke.”

“Three feet too many,” Julio retorts, faceless and near. ”Gross.”

He pulls absently at Shatterstar’s grip on him, and when Shatterstar reluctantly complies, fingers thread through his and hold fast with stunning symmetry. Shatterstar’s fingertips press into the groove between Julio’s knuckles. He wants to travel backward and find Julio when his hair was long and he wore vests and broke into Spanish cheerily and do this with their hands, the moment he woke up and didn’t want to leave his bed, for fear of intolerable need at the sight of Julio. How better a way to express the craving. How have they missed out on this physicality for so long?

“Remember,” Julio says, “how you had a to-do list for snowy days. Like some shopping list to do winter right or something. Make a snow angel. Make an igloo. Snowmen. Snow families. Have hot chocolate, but only if it had marshmallows. Have a snowball fight, and then go sledding if it killed you.”

“So we used cardboard.”

“Ghetto, but hey.”

“I had fun.”

“You grinned like a little child.” Julio presses his weight into their joined hands and lifts himself, searching Shatterstar’s face in the dark. ”You were,” he bites his tongue. ”How do you — you were… contagious.”

“Most people back then settled on ‘weird,’” Shatterstar reports up to him.

“How genuinely I could feel — ” Julio half-rolls his eyes at himself, suddenly and irrevocably self-conscious, and sits back on Shatterstar’s hips. ”Yeah. What else.”

“Remember how I always wanted pictures of you as a boy?” Shatterstar asks, keeping their hands laced with certainty.

Julio snorts. ”Yeah, one of your weekly obsessions.”

“I can’t help but think,” Shatterstar tells the tall dark above his head, “it would be useful to keep the past alive.”

“Why,” Julio asks with plain distaste. His disagreement sounds loud for here. ”It’s like, in my case, that kid me doesn’t have any say in how life’s gone.”

“I know.”

“What’s the use, then?”

“It’d be cute.”

Julio huffs a laugh, relief burning low. ”Always had a rat’s nest in my hair. Always went barefoot when I could help it. Always stubbed toes. God.”

“I’m glad your hair curls the way it does now.”

Julio smiles down at him, and Shatterstar knows Julio must be something hallowed. 

“I’m glad you’re sitting on me.”

Julio pauses, then slowly lifts himself off.

“I’m serious.”

Julio uncertainly sits on him again.

“I wanted,” Shatterstar pauses, knitting his brows. ”I wanted something like this. But in every way I could manage it. It sounds funny. I can’t describe what it is that I wanted.”

“English,” Julio rationalizes for him.

When Shatterstar forgets to respond, Julio lowers his head. ”That kid’s a stranger now. He’s someone else’s memory.”

Shatterstar tilts his head, scratching against coarse sheets. ”I wanted to know more of you.”

“He’s someone else,” Julio breathes. ”And I’m here. I’m the one who’s still here.”

“Maybe there’s something else to remember,” Shatterstar wonders.

“Maybe it’s not worth remembering.”

“If you saw yourself in those pictures, maybe you’d stop thinking that way.”

Julio pulls his hands away, wrenching them cold and free. ”This is me. Sorry.”

“Sorry,” Shatterstar echoes.

Julio moves onto his knees with a ghostly sort of gentleness, seeking to evade. 

“Wait,” Shatterstar says. He reaches up to grasp Julio’s waist to drag him down again, raising himself to meet him. He kisses him searchingly, a strain of need stitching his hold on Julio’s clothing, his bones under clothing and skin and muscle.

Julio settles against Shatterstar’s thigh. ”Easy,” he exhales when he pulls back. 

Shatterstar surges up to kiss him again. 

Clumsy, Julio presses his thigh between Shatterstar’s legs, firm as he does the same for himself and locks them in together.

“I don’t wanna forget this, either,” Shatterstar says, abrupt in the tense silence. 

Julio finds the other’s neck and presses wet, soft kisses there, breathing a sort of longing sigh as Shatterstar hurredly loops a finger in his threadbare jeans and slides those old things off his hips, feeling out the angles of bone and the band of his underwear, pulling it like it’s all he can do to not tear it off; and he could, he could.

“I don’t want you to forget.”

“Forget what?”

“How much I want you right now.”

Julio’s eyelids snap shut, for a moment. “I wish — dammit.” He struggles with himself for a moment, disheveled and lost in his own dilemma. He inhales as if to speak. He exhales in a seething sigh. ”Frick. English is — “

“Flawed,” Shatterstar says. ”But it’s a language we share, so there.”

Julio smiles, where Shatterstar feared he wouldn’t. Tenuous, but extant. ”I have another.”

Julio moves his hips, his thighs against Shatterstar. He whispers wordlessly, unsteady in Shatterstar’s ear, bracing himself with hands twisting the sheets on either side of Shatterstar.

They find a rhythm, erratic, the roll of hips slow as Julio can manage, for as long as Shatterstar can hold out until he wants to hear Julio louder, wants to see him undone.

He takes Julio’s waist, shoving at the tangle of clothing and heat of blankets.

He rolls Julio onto his back and ruts against him, clothed and craving all the more for it. 

“Oh,” Julio says. His eyes report apprehension, that radio whisper of expectancy in the moments where want is as immense as need.

What Julio does with his hips could drive Shatterstar insane.

The last trains out of the city pass close by. Mysterious dogs wander their nighttime empire. Julio’s hair strikes over his eyes and forehead as he frots himself against Shatterstar, eyelids fluttering, eyes on Shatterstar.

His hands grasp at the waist of Shatterstar’s trousers and tug ineffectively. Hope overflows grossly within Shatterstar and he pulls his hips away from Julio’s thigh to grapple off his trousers and empty out his pockets.

With able hands, Julio goes on and embraces Shatterstar. He holds for all he’s worth. Shatterstar breathes when he remembers to. He smells laundry detergent. He imbibes Julio’s heat in pulses.

He doesn’t know what to say. Fingers lubricated, half-naked, knees tangled in his trousers, he presses his face against Julio’s shoulder. He covers Julio and wants to hide him away.

But Julio moves against him like an order, and he obeys with his fingers, with his body. He devotes himself until Julio bucks up against him, shuddering. He slides against and inside him, slow and aching and sweet. He watches Julio’s head fall against the mattress, fingers pulling at Shatterstar’s sleeves as if in emergency.

Shatterstar listens, susceptible to suggestion, pressing in deep and watching Julio’s back arch and his eyes flicker in the uneasy dark. Somehow, they find each other.

A soul must escape somewhere, when it’s finished. He thinks every one of those extinguished pieces are out there somewhere.

Up in the air. They all find one another and they recolonize. They are learning how to resurrect.

Even Guido’s.

Shatterstar tries, in a moment of indomitable fear, to imagine how he could float so far after Julio’s soul with only this immense emptiness inside him, all this spiritless space.

His throat constricts. It’s a blessing that what they do has no words.

Then Julio whispers, as Shatterstar enters into him again, “Don’t move.”

Shatterstar shivers to brace himself and stills inside him, taut and desperate, panting. He focuses on Julio, in spite of himself. He remembers this.

Julio so precarious, eyes lit for him. The life you could almost live, if you were safe. ”There,” Julio says. ”I have you, now.”


End file.
